A woman in an office, speaking on a landline phone, with shelves of organised binders in the background.

There can be several reasons for recording phone calls, from gathering evidence for a legal case to giving yourself some security when making verbal agreements. However, one often overlooked benefit is how call recording can help companies improve customer service and a few other things. By recording calls both made and received by your staff members, you can:

  • Evaluate their performance. It can be very useful for managers and supervisors to check in on their teams repeatedly to evaluate their performance. Listening to how customer service advisors handle customer calls gives managers a good way to do it, as it enables them to flag up concerns, praise excellent work and consider improvements that need to be made to the team.
  • Use it as a training tool. A recorded call can be a great way to train a recruit, as the trainee and supervisor can listen to the exchange, discuss improvement areas, and praise what went well.
  • Assess customer needs. If the same complaints, requests or issues come up repeatedly when you listen back to call records, you could be doing something different for your customers. You can log the issue and take steps to address it, perhaps in the other systems your business uses. This makes your customers happier, makes your business more efficient, and hopefully reduces the number of support/customer service calls you to receive.
  • Keep records of customer interactions. Written notes can provide a record of customer calls, but it's very easy for the information to be recorded inaccurately. An actual audio record of the call contains all of the necessary information, which can be used to help customers in the future and when dealing with complaints and issues.

The legal need-to-know of call recording

Recording calls between your operators and customers, here are the essentials you need to know:

  • You have to tell customers that you will be recording the call. You must do this before the call begins (most businesses do this through a pre-recorded message) and briefly explain what the recording will be used for. For example, you'll use calls for training or quality control purposes.
  • You have to ask permission. This step is usually done when informing customers that you will be recording the call, as the customer cannot proceed if they are unhappy.
  • You must keep the recording safe. If you lose, sell, share, give away or post online the recording or any part of it, you will be in breach of Data Protection laws. As you are the recording owner, it is up to you to look after it and keep the confidential data it may contain safe.